


Many-Worlds Theory

by TheFlashFic



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Gen, already au based on previews for 2x14, also au because it's all about the cisco, post 2x13
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-11
Updated: 2016-02-11
Packaged: 2018-05-19 16:58:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5974783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheFlashFic/pseuds/TheFlashFic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cisco Ramon saves the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Wrote this the day after 2x13. I mean if the show has any sense they'll let Cisco become an all-powerful omniscient god, right?

Cisco wasn’t lying to Barry: he felt nothing when Barry sent his evil doppelganger flying across the room. But he felt it when Reverb died.

It was a brief sensation, a cutting of a thread. Like the feeling of someone pulling one of his hairs out by the root, but…inside his chest somewhere.

He didn’t have time to think much about it, because Zoom had Barry and Cisco was left alone with a strange Iris and her unconscious partner and an evil Caitlin sneaking out the back.

And a dead body on the ground that looked just like him.

Fortunately Iris was distracted by her partner, and as she ran over to check on him Cisco got himself up off the ground and approached his…approached Reverb.

Seeing him lying there in a heap, it was useless to try to feel the same disgust he felt earlier. Having an evil doppelganger was apparently a pretty common thing between worlds. And maybe Reverb did have some bigger plan, something a little more substantial than ‘being a god’ and 'ruling a city’.

Reverb offered to help him, to train him. That was more than any of the good guys had done.

Anyway, he was dead. Dead of a speedster’s hand in the chest, a death Cisco was intimately, horribly acquainted with. All his plans, his evil, his cocky and vaguely Snartish voice, his grandiose claims, snuffed out. Was there an evil Dante in this universe? A family that would miss him?

“Hey! Whatever the hell your name is!”

He jumped and turned, spotting Iris crouched by her partner. “Cisco.”

“Yeah, I don’t care. I need to call for a medical team. Can you stand guard here?” She was already standing, already heading towards the back of that warehouse, where they had come in just minutes ago.

“Got it,” Cisco answered idly, since she didn’t seem to be waiting and there was nothing really to guard except a knocked-out cop and two bodies.

One that looked like Ronnie. One that looked like Cisco.

He heaved a breath and looked back at his doppelganger. He had to get back to Harry. Zoom had Barry, things were critical. They were going to fail if they didn’t come up with a plan soon, and both Jesse and Barry Allen were going to pay the price.

That gave him an idea, and he approached Reverb’s body on dragging footsteps.

“The leather’s a good look. Not my style, but you worked it. We really should have talked more about the hair, though.” He spoke faintly as he crouched, since joking made it easier. “Look, um…I’m sorry you were such a dick. And I’m sorry you won’t be able to show me how you…” He looked around absently, and sighed. “Okay, I don’t know the etiquette about stealing from yourself when you cross dimensions, but…I need these more than you do.”

He reached for the goggles, so eerily similar to his but glowing and functional because they were made for this earth. But he hesitated, fingers hovering near Reverb’s head.

He could still vibe from touch sometimes, and he wasn’t sure if he wanted to get a look at his twin’s life on this earth or felt a little sick at the idea of it even being possible.

He stared at the slack, dead face of a strange Cisco Ramon, flexed his fingers absently, then reached down and plucked the goggles off of Reverb as quickly as he could. As he drew back he got to his feet, took a few steps back for good measure.

The moment he noticed the glazed stare of open eyes in the dim light he turned away from the body entirely. He really didn’t need one more image of a dead Cisco Ramon to keep him up at night. He had enough trouble with his own various deaths doing that job.

 

* * *

 

 

Harry was waiting at the CCPD when Iris and Cisco finally made it back. Cisco hadn’t said much to her on the way: they were both a little shook, he thought. If he tried to make small-talk then he’d probably let 'oh and hey that guy that Zoom kidnapped is your husband. Ish.’ slip out some way or another.

One look at Harry’s pinched face and wild eyes made Cisco want to groan.

Instead he followed him out to his car and got in silently. Harry slammed his door and blasted them out into the surprisingly-clear and clean road and the air felt so thick Cisco was surprised he could draw in air at all.

“Zoom has Barry.”

It didn’t seem to be a question, but Cisco nodded in response.

“Zoom has Barry, which means he doesn’t need Jesse anymore.”

There was a thickness in that, a heaviness. Harry didn’t think Zoom was going to just let Jesse go.

“And we don’t have anything.”

Cisco looked over, saw the white knuckles on the steering wheel, the way his eyes glittered way too brightly under the streetlights.

Harry was a step from falling apart. He had been this whole time, really, but now it was passing through anger and going right to despair.

“We have this.” Cisco held out the goggles as an offering, a little sign of hope.

Harry barely glanced his way, but gave a longer second look when he seemed to realize what Cisco was holding. “Where did you get…forget it. Do they work? Put them on.”

Cisco drew the goggles back to his chest, turning them around and around in his hands. “They’ve gotta be different than the ones we built on Earth One.”

“Yeah, because they will actually work, supposedly. Put them on, Ramon.”

“I don’t know…” He hesitated. “The version of Vibe here, he could do things I haven’t even—”

Harry slammed on the breaks, jerking the car to the side of the road. “Is there a chance they will help us find Jesse before she’s murdered by that monster?”

Cisco felt the heaviness of the air just like that, breathing too shallowly. He turned the goggles one last time. “I really don’t know if this is–”

“ _Put them on!_ ”

His hands fumbled at the harsh command, thinking of Thawne and Harry and Wells and hands in his chest and all the commands he so eagerly obeyed before he knew better. God but it was always a mess in his head when Harry was around.

But Harry was right, wasn’t he? Jesse was suddenly expendable, and Barry was in danger, and Zoom had to be found.

They looked the same. They looked the same, and Reverb had the same powers as Cisco, from what he said. He just had a hell of a lot more that Cisco hadn’t tapped into yet. It would be fine, right?

Harry shifted suddenly, leaning in.

Cisco flinched back and raised the goggles to his face. “Okay, god, I’m doing it!”

They were heavier than his own pair, but they seemed to click into place the same way. But that rush of adrenaline, the tension and heart-pounding that usually shot through him instantly, that didn’t come.

Instead he felt a warmth, a calmness. A kind of euphoria. Like suddenly his body was drunk but his mind was crystal clear. Or the other way around. There was the familiar heat of a dopamine flood, but whoever built these for Reverb must not have hated him the way Harry seemed to hate Cisco more often than not. Whoever built these didn’t mean for him to be in a constant state of fear.

“What do you see?” Harry asked, his voice tense. “Ramon! Talk!”

Cisco turned towards his voice, though the goggles had dimmed his vision into blue-toned black. He felt himself smiling at the command, finding it suddenly incredibly funny that for all Harry’s ego and brains and lone-wolf crap he was utterly dependent on other people for every aspect of dealing with Zoom.

Nothing funny about a dad desperate to save his daughter, though, so despite the near-giddiness shooting through him Cisco sat back and schooled his expression. He let that heat spread, make him boneless in the passenger seat.

And in front of him, suddenly and instantly, the entire universe unfolded and spread out.

He had a vague memory of reading Hitchhiker’s Guide when he was a lonely high school nerd. There was a scene where Zaphod was put into a machine that allowed people to see their scale in the whole universe. Experiencing that, finding out exactly how laughably, insignificantly small you and your life and your problems were in the universe, was supposed to be torture. A punishment. It drove people crazy.

But this. This was–

“Zoom, Ramon! Focus on Zoom. On Jesse, and Barry. Where are they?”

There was no way to answer that. Jesse and Barry and Zoom and Cisco and Harry, they were everywhere. There were millions of them, billions, and images flooded through his mind and in front of his eyes as he watched in wonder.

Infinite worlds, infinite possibilities. Infinite times. It was all spread out wide open in front of him. His own past, his own future. Reverb, or at least one of the Ciscos who become Reverb, being chased from jobs and apartments and from his family because little metahuman alarms made it impossible for him to just hide his powers and go on living his life. Siding with the bad guys because there wasn’t another option open to him. Reverb, learning his powers and growing in strength but still spending hours upon hours checking in on other worlds, other Ciscos, in places where things weren’t so bad.

They were all connected.

This earth’s Reverb, he wasn’t accessible anymore. His light had gone out. His string was plucked. But the other Reverbs, the other Vibes, the other Ciscos who never got fancy nicknames, they were out there waiting for him. They were the strongest calls. Connected to him, crying out to him. Tugging at millions of strings.

Harry’s voice was nothing but a distant mutter of white noise now, unable to draw Cisco’s focus from the way the entire universe and all its possible manifestations seemed to open up in front of him.

Too much, it was too much: Cisco couldn’t even handle vibing his own past yet. But it was right, it was his power, these were other Ciscos calling out to him, wanting their stories to be known.

There was an endlessly humming universe out there just wanting someone to dive through the vibrations and _explore_.

He tried to think about Barry, but there were thousands, millions of Ciscos on worlds with millions of Barrys. They were friends a lot of the time. They hated each other sometimes. Sometimes they never met, just existed in the same world together. Sometimes they knew each other’s faces in passing but that was all. They were lovers, they were husbands, they were bitter foes trying their best to kill each other. They were children playing together before circumstance split them up never to see each other again. Every single possibility existed, every single chance had happened.

There were also millions, billions, countless worlds where one or both of them never existed, or they simply never met.

Everything, everything happened, endless earths with endless time, with the smallest of variations separating them.

Zoom killed Barry, Jesse, Harry, Cisco. Sometimes all, sometimes some, sometimes none. Sometimes he never got powers. Sometimes they killed him before he got too strong. Sometimes he was a hero. Sometimes he was an accountant.

There was too much. Cisco couldn’t focus on anything, because everything lead to a million other things.

He was gone.

He couldn’t even get back to Harry because god, so many versions of Harrison Wells. Some smart, some average, some utterly ambitionless and lazy. Most of them were decent, kind men. Some of them were worse than Harry. Some of them were worse than Eobard.

Cisco couldn’t remember which one was his.

There might have been a hand on Cisco’s shoulder, shaking him, but Cisco barely remembered the feeling of his own body anymore.

_“Dude, you are on serious overload right now.”_

The voice seemed to come through more clearly than the clouded, rushed, endless stream of visions, of knowing. Cisco focused on it, the first thing real and solid he felt in what might have been literal years.

_“Can’t answer me? I’m not surprised. I don’t know who stuck your little preschool brain in this graduate-level visor here, but I could feel your presence the second you touched the thing.”_

The voice sounded like his own. Not like hearing Reverb speak to him from outside, it sounded like his own voice, the way it echoed inside his own head when he spoke out loud. Another Cisco, not him but inside his mind.

They were all connected.

_“You’re getting the idea. I mean we ain’t special, everyone is connected the way we are. But in a whole lotta universes we seem to get the power to access that connection. That’s what sets us apart.”_

But why didn’t Cisco know before now? Why didn’t he see when he first started vibing?

_“Welp. Most of us, the ones who can access each other, we don’t go jumping in on the ones who can’t. Kind of a Prime Directive thing. Do you have Star Trek on your…good, yeah. Prime Directive. Non-interference. But hey, now you’re coming to us, so we can help. Way too frigging soon, man, considering what world you’re from. But then most of us are overachievers.”_

Cisco tried to remember Reverb, the one he had just seen, an hour ago or a lifetime ago.

_“Yeah, there’s some bad ones out there. He was coming around, but now he never will. Sucks, but hey, we snuff out all the time. No grief, there’s a million other worlds where your meeting with him went differently, and he’s still up and kicking.”_

At least the him that was in his head was cheerful. Still, somewhere in the back of his mind there was an urgency that Cisco couldn’t forget about. His best friend, the one on his world, anyway, and a girl he never met. In danger.

The Cisco-voice in his head just laughed. _“You are such a newb. Time ain’t exactly a concern to us here, mijito. I could take you to a million worlds, and still put you back into yours the same moment you started from. Or earlier, if you want to screw things with paradox. Some of us have fun with that.”_

There was no hand on his shoulder anymore, he didn’t think. He wasn’t entirely sure he still had a shoulder. Harry might have killed him in annoyance at being ignored. Or maybe he was just frozen. Maybe this voice was right and time on his own world, whichever world his body was in right then, had stopped being a factor altogether.

_“You’re slower than some of us, man. But quicker than some, too. You starting to get the idea?”_

He thought he was.

_“You want that training Reverb promised you?”_

He definitely did.

_“Sweet. Okay, dude, hang on to your…ha, kidding, nothing to hang on to. We’re out.”_

And Cisco Ramon was gone.

 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

“Remember,” Cisco told him before he let Cisco find his way back, “the hardest part isn’t seeing, or knowing, or doing. The hardest part is _staying.”_

A second ago, a lifetime ago, Cisco wouldn’t have understood what he meant. But he understood a lot now that he hadn’t before.

He didn’t need Cisco – any Cisco – to help him get back to his own world after everything he had learned. He didn’t need help figuring out when to slide back into himself. He even took his time with it, rewound the last little while a few times to remind him of everything he was going back into. Zoom, Harry, The Flash, these were all old problems. Forgotten, in the lifetime he’d spent training.

But they were also the most important things in his life. And his life - Cisco Ramon, Earth One, Vibe, his friends and his family and everything he had to do yet - was everything that mattered.

Endless worlds out there, endless times. He could shut his eyes and find his way to a Cisco who was rich and loved and powerful, or quietly unimportant but so, so happy. He could visit a world, at any time, where Eddie was alive, and Eobard never showed up, where his family understood and valued him.

But those weren’t his. He had his, and he was going to make it a life that other Ciscos would be happy to come see.

The hardest part was staying.

* * *

He became aware, slowly, of goggles on his face, the press of the car’s seat at his back. A hand on his shoulder.

“Zoom, Ramon! Focus on Zoom. On Jesse, and Barry. Where are they?”

All he could hear in Harry’s voice was desperation and fear. The snap, the anger, they were there, but they were just symptoms. So without flinching or tensing, Cisco reached up and slid the goggles off.

He didn’t really need them, after all.  They’d be a good focusing tool – like beam manipulators in laser optics, one of many engineer-Ciscos had described – but that was it.

He looked over at Harry, grinning despite himself. Millions of Harrys, but this one was his. Well, he supposed this one was Reverb’s. His had been killed before Cisco ever met him. But he was on loan.

“What the hell are you grinning about?” Harry barked, twisting in his chair.

Cisco just shook his head and nodded out at the road. “Get us out there. Places to go, bad guys to stop.”

Harry scowled for just a moment, then seemed to read into those words and whatever he saw in Cisco’s face. He let out a breath, hope smoothing his face of some of its pinched lines. “Where to?”

* * *

 

It was kind of funny. An eternity of study and training and getting to know other worlds and other Ciscos, as well as months of terror on his own Earth and Earth Two because of Zoom, but in the end, Cisco knew, this was going to be just super anticlimactic.

There were worlds where Zoom killed Jesse, and the man Harrison Wells became afterward was a thousand times worse than Zoom himself. Time was a factor here, so Cisco wasn’t taking it lightly – he could see into his own future if he tried, but trying just led to causal paradox and logic loops. Some Ciscos liked to surf paradox like it was an X-Game, but Cisco didn’t feel any need to complicate his life that way.

So he directed Harry out onto the highway out of the city, and they laced through dirt roads leading deeper into a winding forest. Harry didn’t ask what Cisco saw or how he knew so much, which was something Cisco appreciated about him. His Harry was single-minded, and that was putting it lightly. Later there’d be questions, and he’d have to figure out how much to say then.

Zoom’s lair was in what used to be an old military training installation back in the War of the America days. Cisco found himself telling Harry absent details about it as they approached: the paths in the trees carved out to be exercise trails, the thousands of troops who came and went, usually doing some specialist infiltration training.

War on Earth Two never devolved into the bomb-people-thousands-of-miles-away-via-computer-game mess that Earth One was, but Cisco could have said exactly how many of the troops that passed through there ended up hacked up, bleeding to death, or losing limbs to dirty infected wounds from up-close combat. ‘Civilized’ was a relative term when it came to war.

He kept that to himself, though. He didn’t really _know_ it, anyway, not unless he focused and went back and paid attention in detail. Right then he needed to _stay._

“How long are we going to have before Zoom shows back up?” Harry asked after Cisco told him to slow down, that they’d have to stop soon and walk if they wanted to go unnoticed.

Cisco glanced over at him. “He’s here.”

Harry’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. “Zoom is here.” He spoke the name tersely, like he always did. 

A lot of hate carried in his voice, Cisco couldn’t help but notice. He used to think Harry used it against Cisco himself, when he was in his worse moods. But nah, his anger in general didn’t compare to his hatred for Zoom.

Cisco knew where it came from. He’d seen it, he even recognized some of it. Harrison Wells, this one, his but not his, had grown up aloof and alienated, with absolutely no idea how to relate to other people. He wanted to, but had no idea how. His awful social skills, his ego, his brains, they all conspired against him to make his childhood friendless and his school years loveless.

Until he met Tess, and had his first moments of real human connection ever. He’d loved her, Cisco knew, with all the intensity of a lifetime of love gone ungiven. And a maniac with a gun had taken her from him years ago.

So Harry turned all that love on their daughter, and all his hate on anyone with the power to hurt and the willingness to kill.

Zoom taking Jesse had been the worst possible option for exacerbating Harry’s already shaky ability to exist with other people around.

Really, in hindsight, he’d been surprisingly well-adjusted since coming to Earth One.

Cisco used to think Harry hated him, because he twisted Cisco’s fears against him every chance he got to make Cisco do things he didn’t want to do. But Harry didn’t have hate to spare for anyone who wasn’t Zoom.

Harry used fear against Cisco because fear was what was being used against Harry, and Harry understood how powerful a motivator it was. That was all there was to it. It was a dick move, but. Dude was pretty schizoid in the real clinical sense, so it fit.

Cisco hadn’t forgiven him because there wasn’t anything to forgive. One thing you learned bouncing around different universes and worlds so much like yours that they gave you deja-vu: things were what they were. Everything had causality. There were millions of worlds where Harrison Wells wasn’t a prick, but in those worlds he hadn’t been given reason to be.

Perspective was a hell of a drug.

It wasn’t until they pulled off the narrow dirt road and got out of the car that Harry spoke again. 

“Zoom is here. This is his turf, he’s got Barry in a cage and my daughter as hostage. All we have is a gun full of darts that might slow him down.”

Cisco smiled easily, peacefully. “He won’t be a problem.”

Harry stared at him hard. He shifted the strap of the gun so it rested over his shoulder. “What the hell did you see? No, forget it. Later.”

Cisco expected that, so he quietly led the way up through the trees.

They’d driven through most of the height. The old installation had been drilled into a hillside to give the soldiers sightlines to learn from, as well as underground rooms for what they called 'seige training’. Cisco distantly knew the layout, knew for sure that Jesse and Barry and Zoom’s other prisoner were being held in cells right beside each other, which made things easier.

Zoom had lost Reverb, he’d lost his ability to seem like he knew every move in advance. Francisco never had been much help to him there, feeding him vague details mostly after they ceased to matter. He was tricky, that guy, and Cisco felt pretty bad for being so disgusted by his apparently evil double.

He’d seen some truly evil Ciscos since then. Strangely – or maybe not strangely – most of them he understood pretty well. Everything had causality, after all. Reverb, Harry Wells, Zoom himself. Cisco had seen most every kind of every version of the people he knew, and what ninety-nine percent of them had in common was that they were all doing their best with the life they’d been given.

Hell, one of the Ciscos he envied most, before he got over that phase, was one of the ones who had hidden his brain from his parents, stayed firmly in the average range in school, played the guitar, lived with his folks for years into his adulthood, and so had love that seemed to overshadow all his missed potential. The exact life Cisco had dreaded and fought against at all costs: being ordinary, not doing what he loved. 

But that Cisco was happy.

Everyone did their best, made their own choices, and lived with the results.

“Damn it, Ramon.”

Cisco looked back at him even as he picked his way easily up the crest of the hill.

Harry scowled. “You’re freaking me out, you haven’t been this quiet for ten solid minutes since I met you.”

Cisco grinned at that. He had a hell of a lot more on his mind than he had back then. But for the moment he just nodded up ahead of them. “We’re close.”

“What’s the plan here?”

“We go in and stop Zoom and get everyone out safe.”

“I’m just a little hazy on the details. And frankly when you or Barry go off on one of your half-cocked ideas we usually end up worse for it.”

“If Zoom was just a guy – no superspeed, nothing like that – do you think you could take him down?”

Harry glared up ahead of them. His hands fisted at his sides. “Just give me the chance.”

“Okay.”

* * *

 

They only made it within sight of the concrete bunker and the iron door pressed into its side before they were spotted.

There was a crackle of energy, the burn of ozone in the air. Cisco didn’t even have time to blink - and that was the worst thing about evil speedsters, there was never time, the world was just suddenly different than it had been - before Harry was gone from Cisco’s side. A twist of lightning, Harry’s rifle thumping on the ground, that was all that was left.

No, not gone. They were still there. Cisco only had to turn.

Zoom. Zoom was pretty damned terrifying, Cisco had to admit.

Worse than the Reverse Flash ever was, and that guy ripped Cisco’s heart out. Just standing there he was a vibrating mass of black suit wrapped up in the dangerous hum of crackling energy. He was tall, broad, and everything human about him was hidden inside that warped suit. The lighting didn’t help – it shot flashes of eerie blue light through the dark trees and cast him in shadows that added to his darkness and made him look heavier, bigger.

Harry dangled from Zoom’s hand like he was hollow, like he weighed nothing. His hands gripped Zoom’s arm, Zoom’s hand tight around his throat. He was already red and desperate for air.

It fired something up inside of Cisco, something that was new to him. He had explored countless worlds, seen Ciscos and Caitlins and Jesses die again and again and again. But this was his Harry. This was his world – sort of – and he’d be damned before he let this remarkable and troubled life end at the whim of a dick with too much power and a drive to do harm.

Luckily the move he knew, the anti-climactic ending he’d already pretty much foreseen, worked just as well when he was fired up.

“Hey!” he shouted, ignoring the fact that quite a few less dramatic Ciscos would have shaken their heads at him and told him to get on with it. “Put him down!”

Zoom’s head twisted, his faceless mask aiming Cisco’s way. “I already killed one of you tonight, boy.”

And okay, even with Cisco’s newly broadened perspective, that voice was frigging scary. Still, he knew this fight, and he knew his move, and he knew the ending. Made it easy to stay calm. 

“Yeah, see, that was a mistake. Ciscos don’t like it when someone takes one of us out as a bullshit power move. And it turns out there’s a few things Reverb didn’t know about what we can do.”

Harry wheezed suddenly, a loud rush of pinched air in and out, and Cisco knew he’d at least distracted Zoom a little bit. But yeah, okay, probably best not to play the superhero-banter game when Harry was actively being strangled.

So Cisco ignored the uncanny valley shiver that mask stirred up, and he raised his arm. He’d only done this a few times, in borrowed Cisco bodies, but he already felt the crackle of energy under his skin that told him it would work. “It’s the speedforce you’re after? Well…it’s not yours, pal. And you can’t have it anymore.”

The wave shot out, nearly invisible but for minute ripples in the air. A stronger blast than his practice turns, but this was someone whose connection needed to be severed for good.

The moment it struck Zoom, the effect was jarring. That larger than life vibrating body stilled at once, and the easy strength he was lofting Harry with failed, sending Harry crashing down to the ground as Zoom’s arm gave in and dropped.

One moment he was an inhuman monster, the next…he was a man in a suit.

Zoom staggered backwards, staring down at himself, at his hands, at Harry on the ground gasping for air.

“No.” Zoom stood there, breathing harshly, staring at his hands like he was willing them to start vibrating. “No! What did you do?”

His voice wasn’t as terrifying when you took away speedforce and added in shock and fear.

Zoom was an addict, Cisco knew. His need for the speedforce, the need that STAR had created in him, hadn’t been his fault. His addiction wasn’t his fault. But the speedforce was a constant, eternal and everywhere. Zoom’s needless decision to rob others of their connection to it to strengthen his own, that was what made him a giant prick who had to be stopped.

Cisco wasn’t heartless. Zoom’s connection to the speedforce had been severed, for good, but so had his need for it. They went hand in hand, after all. The speedforce, same in every universe, never called to anyone who couldn’t access it. Not even with the help of dark matter waves and lab accidents.

“I did you a favor,” Cisco said out loud, though he was pretty sure Zoom wouldn’t see it that way. “You can be free now.”

“No! NO!” Zoom’s arms dropped to his sides and he faced Cisco. “Take it back! Undo it!”

“I can’t. Doesn’t work that way.” 

If the speedforce wanted someone to be part of it then Cisco couldn’t have ever severed their connection entirely, just cut it off for a while. But Zoom had been poisoning it for too long, and it was done with him.

“Give it back!” It was a wail, despairing, fierce, and Zoom took heavy, stumbling steps Cisco’s way.

Harry had found his feet by then, though. He met Cisco’s eyes from behind Zoom for just a moment, even gave a tight kind of blood-minded smile, and then he stalked after Zoom, bringing his fist back for a hit.

Anticlimactic, really, how Zoom fell in defeat at the first blow. He’d gotten used to being too fast to take hits. Gave him a glass jaw. That or sheer despair had made him weak.

Cisco almost felt bad for him, really. Strength diminished was always kinda sad.

But he ignored the feeling. Perspective, truly a bitch. Anyway there were things to do.

He clapped Harry on the shoulder as he stood over Zoom. “Come on, man. Let’s get your daughter.”

Harry led the way.

* * *

 

Jesse was shut behind bars, but there were keys hanging on the wall by the door leading down to the cells. Cisco tossed them to Harry, who charged to get his daughter.

Barry and the other prisoner were waiting in plastic-walled cells near her, just where Cisco knew they’d be. Barry looked a little more beat-up than Cisco had seen. Damn it, should have gotten there sooner.

“Cisco!” Barry got to his feet too slowly and pounded on the transparent cell wall as if Cisco wouldn’t have noticed him otherwise. “Cisco, Zoom is out there! He’s here, you have to–”

“Dude. It’s cool.” Cisco went to the silent prisoner first, palm coming out to direct a brief blast at the cell wall. It was a transparent plastic composite, stronger than steel. But everything had a frequency. There wasn’t a thing on this earth or any other that Cisco Ramon couldn’t shake apart down to its very molecular structure if he wanted to.

The plastic crackled like glass being splintered, then simply fell in a cascade of fragments finer than sand. Cisco prefered the powder method, it was safer. Some Ciscos went for rubble and big blasts, but they were in close quarters here and flying shards were dangerous.

He…well, he actually kind of _enjoyed_ the startled, strangled sound Barry let out, but he didn’t look back at him. He stepped through the pile of powder. “Hey, man.”

The tension coming from the masked prisoner was fierce, a wave nearly visible in the same way Cisco’s bursts were.

Cisco crouched. “Zoom’s done. He’s not a problem anymore, dude. And give it a few days, you’re gonna feel the speedforce again. He couldn’t take it from you for good, I promise. It’s ready for you when you’re strong enough to come back.”

“Cisco?” Barry’s voice was distant.

Cisco unlatched the back of that ridiculous mask, and grinned down at Wally West as he squinted up and around them. “Funny story, on one earth it was me that cut you off from the speed for a while. You didn’t take it all that well.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Wally sounded distant, rough. Hadn’t used his voice in a while. Damn mask had muted him.

“ _Wally_?”

Cisco ignored Barry again, holding out a hand to help Wally up. “Come on, man. You’ve got a sister who really needs you right now.”

“Iris…” Wally looked back at Cisco warily, and then over at Harry and Jesse, who were currently wrapped up in each other, and back at Barry. “Okay. W-why the hell is my brother-in-law in a cage wearing a dumbass costume?”

“Long story.” Cisco grinned and headed back to Barry. “Stand back, man.”

Barry obeyed, staring at him in perfect confusion. He watched the wall between them dissolve into nothing at the slightest gesture of Cisco’s hand. “Reverb?”

“Dead,” Cisco reported, then realized a moment later that Barry wasn’t asking, Barry thought he was Reverb. He grinned. “You know how the very best corny 90s martial arts flicks all have a montage where the hero learns way too much in about as much time as it takes Peter Cetera to sing a song? I had one of those earlier, hard core.”

“I…look forward to hearing about it.” Barry stepped out of the cell and studied Cisco carefully, but seemed to recognize enough in him to relax. “Where’s Zoom?”

Cisco laughed. “I kind of can’t wait to show you. Let’s get everybody out of here, huh?”

* * *

 

There wasn’t much on any world as disconcerting as Harry Wells attacking Cisco with a completely gratuitous surprise hug.

Barry and Barry and Iris and Wally were all playing catch-up back at the West-Allen house, and Cisco was peacefully hanging out watching the news on the disturbingly portrait-set TVs, guarding Jesse as she got some sleep on the couch of Harry’s office at STAR. Zoom had been arrested, they were approaching the deadline to head back across the portal to their own earth, and all was right with the world.

Until Harry strode in and up to Cisco and hauled him against him. 

It took Cisco a few seconds to recognize the attack for what it was. “Oh my god, you’re dying.”

Harry drew back and scowled at him, but the expression softened almost at once and he actually pulled him back for a few more seconds of strange, strange hugging. “Thank you, Ramon. Cisco.” His voice was rough. “I don’t know what you did or how, but thank you.”

Cisco relaxed at that, even looping an arm around Harry’s back and patting him awkwardly. “You know…” He hesitated. Warning people about things he shouldn’t know was an iffy thing to do. But. Hug. “Zoom wasn’t just holding them down in those cells. He was experimenting.”

“What?” Harry jerked back and looked over at the couch against the wall, at Jesse in her peaceful curl. His wide eyes went back to Cisco.

“He didn’t steal Jay’s speed, Jay lost it on his own. But once Zoom knew that it was possible to steal speed and give it to someone else, he was testing it out. That’s why he grabbed Wally. Wally had a connection, but he was just figuring it out and learning how to use it. He was a lot weaker than Barry. And Zoom didn’t know the first thing about what he was doing. But there’s probably gonna be a few repercussions.”

“Like what? What did he do to my daughter?”

“Besides kidnapping and traumatizing her?” Cisco shrugged. “That’s enough. But if you want my advice, we should leave that last portal between our Earths open for a while. You’re gonna want Barry’s advice in a few weeks time. Unless you want to make nice with Jay instead.”

“His advice? Ramon, what the hell are you…” He sucked in a breath and looked back at Jesse, eyes widening.

Cisco grinned. “Yeah. She’s about to start earning that nickname you gave her in a way you didn’t expect.”

Harry breathed out a faint 'oh’ and took a step towards the couch. But he hesitated, looking back at Cisco, brow furrowed. “What happened to you when you put those goggles on?”

Cisco shrugged easily. “You wanted me to figure out how to save Jesse. So I did.”

Harry frowned, but looked back at his daughter. “The one time I suspect I wouldn’t mind hearing you ramble on about something, you go and develop conciseness.”

“Just another reason to keep the portals open. You can wheedle it out of me someday.”

Harry seemed satisfied with that. He headed to the couch, crouching down and sweeping Jesse’s hair out of her face as she slept. Gentleness in that gesture that he had never demonstrated before in anything.

Cisco grinned, looking back at the TV to give them a little space.

They’d go soon, he and Barry. Harry might come to, to say goodbye to Caitlin, get his research from the lab, whatever. The portal would stay open. Maybe against common sense, but it would.

Cisco wasn’t all that worried about it. He at least would be able to check in whenever he wanted to, though communicating with Harry or Jay would be easier with a portal.

Either way, he wanted to go home. It was an itch under his skin, a crackle of energy, the sensation that the frequencies around him weren’t quite the right ones. Cisco hadn’t been to his home, his earth, in too long to measure, even if it had only been two days in real time. He’d seen the most distant, different, similar worlds imaginable, and learned so many things about himself and time and place and huge, grand concepts he never would have cared about before. The way everything was linked in invisible ways. The way everyone was connected to every version of themselves, even if they’d never learn to access it the way so many Ciscos could.

A million Barrys, a million Caitlins, a million Joes and Irises and Dantes and Snarts. Better versions of everyone he knew on his own earth, and worse versions. Cisco would never again make a single choice without knowing full well that he was tearing apart the universe, expanding it, creating world upon world where other choices were made, or no choice at all. Everything everyone did had so much relevance. Everything, everyone was so damned important, and that was what Hitchhiker’s Guide got wrong about how it would feel to show someone how small they were in the universe.

Because sure, they were small, but they were the very center of it all the same. They were microscopic nucleii to the atom of the universe. Invisible, really. But an atom wouldn’t even exist without its nucleus.

Cisco Ramons, whether they were good or bad or powerless, most of them came to understand that. The huge, overwhelming value of every single person around them, and the infinite worlds that every person created.

The hardest part, one Cisco had told him before he went back, was staying.

But it was Cisco’s world, Cisco’s Barry and Caitlin and Iris and Joe. Even if they weren’t the best versions of themselves, they were the people who made the choices that put them in line with his own choices. They were the ones who landed in his universe, on his earth, and he couldn’t imagine loving anyone on any other world as much as he loved them.

He was ready to go back, ready to start tearing apart everything he knew and making it work for him, protecting his city along with Barry, and making his earth one he’d be proud of.

And he had a feeling that ignoring the infinite possibilities in the whole universe to stay in that universe wasn’t really gonna be a problem.

 


End file.
